A corporate or enterprise network may service many branch offices. Each branch office may have its own network, servers and resources. An appliance may be deployed at a branch office to provide gateway services locally to the client or servers located at the branch office. In the corporate-wide network, branch office appliances may be deployed at each of the branch offices. Many resources, such as servers, applications, data files may be deployed across these branch offices. Additionally, a branch office may have under utilized resources and available computing time.
At any of the branch offices there may be resources that could be available or useful to access by users or computing devices at other branch offices. For example, a client of a first branch office may want to access a resource, such as an application, on a server at a second branch office. In some cases, the client of the first branch office is not aware of the existence or availability of resources at the second branch office. In other cases, resources at branch offices lay idle as they are not easily available to users across the corporate network.
This results in inefficient use of the corporate network and deployed resource. In order to avail a client of a branch office access to resources from another branch office, an administrator may need to manually and specifically configure the gateway or branch office appliance to know of the other appliances in the network. With resources deployed across many branch offices, each of the branch office appliances may need to be manually configured to know of the other branch office appliances. This leads to significant amount of time and costs in configuring and maintaining multiple branch office appliances or gateway.
It would, therefore, be desirable to provide systems and methods to reduce branch office configuration while load-balancing resources globally across the enterprise and branch offices.